The new production opening the Domino Theatre’s new season may be one of the worst plays ever staged, which makes it entertaining.

While Murder at Checkboard Manor is cliched and poorly written, it’s nothing compared to the way it plays out onstage: cues and entrances are regularly missed, incorrect props are deployed, wrong sound effects are used at the wrong time (the phone continues to ring even after it’s answered, for example), and the set is anything but sound. And the acting … well, it’s something else.

Thankfully, though, Murder at Checkboard Manor is just the play within the actual play, The Farndale Housing Estate Townswomen’s Guild Dramatic Society Murder Mystery, the real opener of Domino’s 65th season.

David McGillivray and Walter Zerlin Jr. have written 10 plays featuring the fictitious Farndale players, who have bumbled and butchered their way through everything from The Mikado to Macbeth to A Christmas Carol. Checkboard Manor, however, doesn’t have the luxury of being well written; it is a hackneyed script in which most of the numerous characters — such as Lady Doreen Bishop, Clarissa Rook and butler Pawn (get it?) — played by a handful of actors are murdered (as is the dialogue).

While it doesn’t take long to figure out that this production — the hallway leading into the theatre was cleverly plastered with fake playbills and there’s even an insert in the program — is deliberately a dud, it was subtly done.

Before the play even got underway, for example, a wall panel painted with a fireplace on it fell forward, and when Felicity and Audrey (Liane Wintle and Krista Berg) put it back, it was upside down (an audience member felt compelled to tell them as much).

Then, moments later, as Mrs. Reece (Sandy Turcotte) launches into her address to the audience about the show as assistant Thelma (Oscar Cadeau) sets up a portable movie screen onstage. When the home movie is projected, it fills the entire back of the stage, not simply the small screen.

If that didn’t tip you off that something was amiss, then maybe the characters repeatedly walking behind the set — you can see them through the centre-stage window — because one of the set’s doors doesn’t actually function as one in the play even though the characters try repeatedly.

After awhile, though, I found the frequent physical mishaps a bit tedious, but I thought the play really picked up when one of the characters skipped several pages of the script, pages in which one of the characters, Gladys Knight, is introduced. Every time there was a scene with the Knight character, the cast was forced to improvise, which, of course, was ham-handedly done.

Similarly, the energy also seemed to pick up when the “real” actors grew more comfortable onstage as the play wore on, particularly Wintle and Turcotte, who excelled in the second act. Robert Bruce (who played the inspector), Cadeau and Berg seemed cool, confident and calamitous from the outset.

And that’s the thing about this production: the actors seemed to have a really good time acting badly, and that enthusiasm was what made the play amusing, particularly in the second act.

As director Matt Salton noted, the play’s cast and crew came to “realize just how challenging it can be to produce a good play about a bad play.” This ensemble certainly had their work cut out for them in this production, and they succeeded where the Farndale fold failed.